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Author: Renaud Bédard

A bit more than a year ago, I sent this email to Ethan “flibitijibibo” Lee :

And work on FEZ 1.12 officially started.

The goal of this large update to the Windows PC/Mac/Linux version of FEZ was the following :

Cut dependencies to OpenTK, the platform framework used by FEZ on Windows. I have had problems with it from the start, from sound card detection issues to windowing problems, to VSync and fullscreen issues… I wanted to give SDL 2.0 a shot, to see if it fares better.

Have more efficient music streaming. PC + Mac versions of FEZ used a C# Ogg Vorbis decoder called NVorbis, which seemed like a good idea because it would run on all platforms. I also wrote the streaming code that uses NVorbis and OpenAL, and it made its way into the main MonoGame repository! But it’s also very slow, resource-intensive and heavy on disk access. So I wanted to look into a better solution that wouldn’t break music playback in areas like puzzle rooms and the industrial world.

Have a single codebase for all PC + Mac versions of FEZ. As it stood with 1.11, there was a slightly modified codebase for Mac and Linux that ran on a weird hybrid of MonoGame and what would become FNA, called MG-SDL2. The PC version ran on my fork of MonoGame ~3.0 which I did not do a great job of keeping up to date with upstream changes, because when I did it usually broke in mysterious ways. This is not great for maintenance, and centralizing everything on a clean FNA back-end, with as little platform-specific code as I could, seemed like a good idea.

Make it the Last Update. Since I shipped FEZ 1.11 I had little intention of making additional fixes or features to the game because I simply don’t have the time with a kid and a fulltime job… and working on FEZ is getting old after 9 years. So I did want to address problems that people have with the game, but I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I had spent enough time away from the game that I was somewhat enthusiastic about coming back to it, especially if it’s at my pace, and that it’s my last time doing so.

So I didn’t announce anything, I didn’t announce a date, and I slowly chipped away at making this humongous update to FEZ. It’s been in beta-testing with an army of fans, speedrunners and friends since late January 2016 and over 120 bugs have been reported and fixed.

You can read the full 1.12 change log here (it’s also bundled with builds of the game), but I wanted to cover in more detail a few big changes that caused more headaches than I had anticipated.

Singlethreaded OpenGL

FEZ uses a loading thread so it doesn’t block the draw/update loop while levels are loaded. This loading process includes file loading, but the bulk of load times are spent interpreting loaded data : building models, uploading textures to GPU memory, creating shaders, calculating helper structures for collision, etc.

The original XNA version of the game did everything on the loading thread and DirectX 9 somehow made sure that everything would be just fine, even if calls to the graphics driver were made on a thread that wasn’t the main thread.

From version 1.0 to 1.07 of FEZ (PC/Mac/Linux), I used the background OpenGL context that MonoGame provides, so that I didn’t have to retool all my loading code, or slow everything down by synchronizing to the main thread on every GL call. This worked fine… mostly, depending on the driver, on some platforms. My development setup worked pretty good, but I had reports of awful load times on Mac, and on AMD graphics card; clearly this wasn’t good enough.

In FEZ 1.08, I got rid of the background context in favor of a call queue for GL operations that could wait until the next draw to be done (in order), and blocking GL calls for the ones that needed to be done instantly. This was minimally invasive and worked pretty well, but slowed down load times for setups that ran fine before. Also, what is considered a GL call or not is not known or defined by FEZ at this point; MonoGame internally does a check whether we’re on the main thread for every XNA call that involves GL, and if so, uses a closure to defer the call to the main thread (usually by blocking). This was good enough, but not great.

When switching to FNA, I wanted to take advantage of its “Disable Threading” mode which boosts performance and lowers GC strain because it doesn’t need to check whether you’re on the main thread on every graphics function; if you guarantee that you’ll never, ever use them on a secondary thread, it takes your word for it! This means that FEZ would need to do deferral/blocking itself. The loading code had to be retooled and verified throughout the game.

I ended up using a simple method very similar to what MonoGame did : the Draw Action Scheduler. I got rid of the “I need this now!” blocking calls (e.g. loading the sky texture and then instantly after, sampling its pixels for the fog color), and made sure that FEZ could load and process everything on its loading thread before the first draw could be executed, which unqueues and executes these draw actions. To keep the smoothness benefits of having a loading thread, I had to tweak granularity; sometimes it’s better to have a bunch of smaller actions that can be run while the loading screen renders, instead of having one big task that causes lost frames.

Here’s a fun one : I didn’t want to change FNA’s code, and I wanted a Texture2DReader that’s safe to call on a loading thread… so I wrote a FutureTexture2DReader that does file reading inline, but then lets you upload the texture to GPU in a second step :

I also realized that there are a lot of hidden GL operations here and there, that only happen in some circumstances, and that can blow the game up big-time if you’re not careful. There’s no safety net in FNA’s no-threading mode, so you have to be really confident that it’s 100% covered. I’m pretty confident, after a year. :)

Screen scaling modes

The saga of FEZ resolutions and black-bars is hard to justify. The excuses have varied from “it was meant to be run in 720p, so we only offer multiples of that” to “okay I guess we can do 1080p but it won’t look great” to “okay I guess we don’t actually have to pillarbox, but sometimes we’ll still letterbox”.

I think most people will be happy with the implementation we chose to go with in 1.12 :

No more black bars. The handful of situations where black bars were still required (mostly because I had been lazy and assumed a 16:9 aspect ratio) have been reworked. The only downside is that you might see the vertical ends of a level if you try hard enough, but it’s worth the presentation overhaul. One sensible exception : if you use a resolution that does not match your display adapter’s aspect ratio in fullscreen, the game auto-detects it and adds black bars so that the game does not appear distorted.

You choose the scaling mode. Not literally 1x/2x/3x because specific levels have control over that, but you choose whether you want the intended zoom level, prefer pixel-perfect scaling (which may cause a wider-than-intended zoom), or want to compromise with a supersampled view at the intended zoom level. The latter option is my favorite because it has no impact on pixel-perfect resolutions (like 720p and 1440p) but, for instance, will render with a 1440p backbuffer in 1080p in order to provide minimal pixel crawl/jitter… and provides anti-aliasing in first-person mode and whenever rotating objects are used. It’s a bit softer so people might prefer not to use it; but it’s an option!

1080p Full Aspect

1080p Pixel-Perfect

1080p Supersampled From 1440p

Visual interpolation between fixed timesteps

Let me tell you the story of a .NET API misunderstanding that has deep consequences…

Let’s say you use the TimeSpan.FromSeconds() factory method to make a TimeSpan object that represents the duration of a 60hz frame. You’d use it like this :

var frameDuration = TimeStep.FromSeconds(1 / 60.0);

And I wouldn’t blame you for it. The method takes a double, there’s no indication that it would do any kind of rounding… but if you read the documentation :

It’s not because TimeSpan’s precision stops at milliseconds, it store everything in ticks. It makes no sense. But here we are.

For the 5 years of its development, FEZ was designed with a 17ms timestep because of this issue. The physics were tweaked with a 17ms fixed timestep in mind, and yep, it skipped frames like it’s nobody business. Because it ran at approximately 58.8235294 frames per second, instead of the intended 60.

To help with this in FEZ 1.08 (PC/Mac/Linux), I decoupled the update and draw calls such that more than one draw can be done for one engine update. This eliminates tearing with a 60hz V-Sync, but once or twice every second, the same frame is presented twice in a row to the screen, which makes the game feel jittery. It was relatively minor, so I let it slide.

Fast-forward to 1.12, in which I decide to try and support my fancy new 120hz monitor properly. Drawing frames twice isn’t exactly great, it does make the game match the monitor’s synchronization but it doesn’t look any better than 60hz. Then Gyoo is play-testing the game and notices the original issue, that the game jitters even at 60hz… and it sinks in that the same root cause is making the game locked at an update framerate that doesn’t make any sense. I have to do something about it.

There’s two ways to go here, and both are painful : interpolate, or switch to a variable time-step. I already had tried the latter option when still developing the game for Xbox 360 and it’s very hard to pull off. The potential for hard-to-reproduce physics bugs is real, and it would mean retesting the whole game many times until we get it right. However, some parts of the game are easy to transition to a variable timestep in isolation since they don’t depend on the game’s physics, or have no impact on gameplay. So I went with a hybrid solution :

Gomez uses interpolation. This means that for every update, the next frame’s position is also computed, and when Gomez gets drawn, he gets interpolated to the right position between those two frames depending on timing.

The camera, sky, moving platforms, grabbed/held cubes and cube bits uses a variable time-step. These could relatively easily be transitioned to compute their movement/position per-draw instead of per-update, which was an instantaneous boost to fluidity, especially at framerates higher than 60hz.

Everything else is still at 17ms fixed timesteps. It turns out that it doesn’t matter for most entities to have fully smoothed movement, especially at that chunky world resolution, and with a fully smooth camera. So I stopped there.

This sounds like a fun time, but I’ve been working on regressions that these changes caused since I started the task back in April 2016. There were a lot of corner cases, places where the camera’s position was assumed to be the same in matching update and draw calls, jittering stars and parallaxed elements and… the list goes on. But the result is there : the game looks really, really good in 120hz right now.

Additional reading

Ethan wrote a whole series of posts during FEZ 1.12 development that covers other things that the patch addresses :

Special Thanks

First off, huge, HUGE thanks to Ethan for making FNA in the first place, motivating me to finish this patch, and working tirelessly on it since day one. Your support, help and dedication blow me away. If you appreciate the work he’s put on FEZ 1.12, consider supporting him on Patreon.

And then, the amazingly helpful testers that have been doing 1.12 testing on their free time to help the project, in no particular order (and I hope I didn’t forget anyone!) :

As you can see, a lot of them are speedrunners. I’m very grateful for the passion of the FEZ speedrunning community, watching things like Vulajin run FEZ at AGDQ last year was amazing; I wanted to make the game solid for you guys!

Thanks for reading, and please enjoy FEZ 1.12!

From June 2012 to August 2013, I had a ask me anything kinda page on Formspring, a social network/website that hosted such pages (similar to ask.fm, which I believe came in later). I didn’t realize that it was regarded as a pretty crappy site, so I stuck with it for more than a year… and later in 2013, it was sold and re-branded as Spring.me, started getting flooded with spam, and finally died last week, in September 2015.

Thankfully, I did export the answers I had written in March 2013, since Formspring added a tool to do so when they announced that they would close or rebrand. It’s a shame that I lost everything between March and August, but here’s what I saved anyway :

Edit : Thanks to Reddit /r/fez user utter_bodge, I was able to recover the text of the few Q&A that I was missing! The answering dates are wrong though, so disregard that.

“I Know This” is a game I made for the Global Game Jam 2015 along with Gavin McCarthy (art, design), Adam Axbey (sound effects) and Matthew Simmonds (4mat) (music); I did programming and design. The name we chose for the team was Two’s Complement.

Version 1.1 should clear all known bugs except for the seemingly rare “return does nothing” and the “redtext has HTML code in it” bugs which I can’t reproduce accurately at the moment. Let me know if there are new/other issues! And thanks for your patience.

Straight outta Isla Nublar

Remember that one scene in Jurassic Park? The one where Lex hacks the computer system in order to lock a door and protect everyone from the raptors, and exclaims…

That was basically the whole premise for our game.

When I saw the movie as a kid, that scene (and the file system UI that Lex “hacks”) always stuck with me as a quintessential faux-futuristic Hollywood representation of how computers work. I learned a bit later that this GUI was not made for the movie, but actually existed on SGI workstations and was ported to Linux as well, so it’s more legit than it looks! But in the end, it’s still a really great artifact of 90’s VR hopes and dreams, in which everything is better in 3D, even file browsers. (and Web browsers, too)

The Game

It starts with the same basic premise as the scene in the movie : you have to find a file. To make it more interesting than your average hidden object game, you need to hack specific Search Nodes (purple files) which, upon successful hacking, will help you narrow down which potential Golden Folder contains what you’re looking for. Don’t pick the wrong one though, all the other ones are full of viruses and bad stuff!
Fun fact : the filenames you’ll see in the game are lifted from your hard drive, and 8.3ified for formatting and retro-chic reasons!

Hacking involves mashing your keyboard until code appears, and hitting the return key where the line endings are, just like in real life. The hacking minigame was heavily inspired by hackertyper.net, a fantastic way to feel like you’re real good at making up C code on the fly. However, we gamified it (oh, the horror) by not letting you go further than line endings, and adding a timer.

As you hack (or fail to hack) search nodes, sentinels will spawn and start looking for you. If they catch you, they warp you back at the root folder. Not a huge punishment, but enough to make you at least a little careful.

And then there’s Clicky, your favourite Office Assistant ripoff. He means well, but he sometimes gets in the way… and hides a dark secret. :o

Closing Thoughts

I don’t know that the game really qualifies as a jam game, because I worked for many evenings after the jam to smooth out the rough edges, make better Clicky interactions, fix the endings and other various bugs. The party version of the game was without music, I asked 4mat to produce something for us after the fact, and we were so soso lucky to have him contribute the lovely tunes you can hear in the game.

This was also my first experience with Unity 5, but I barely touched what it can accomplish. I’d say that the Audio engine is really nice, ducking was painless to implement… and the new UI stuff (even if it’s 4.6 and not 5) was a joy to use compared to the old GUI system.

And Gavin is the best! First time jamming with him, and it was a great match of design sensibilities, work-mindedness and just plain fun. <3

If you follow me on twitter this will be no surprise, but I am completely obsessed with the littleBits modular electronics system, especially the synth bits that came from their collaboration with Korg which are geared especially towards music-making.

I bought my first Synth Kit in April 2014 and fell in love with it. It took less than three weeks for me to order extensions (because let’s face it, the base kit is pretty limitative) and ended up building an obscenely huge collection of modules over the summer.

I even gave a talk in Mexico City about littleBits (among other things) during DevHR, a local technology and games conference. (you can read the slides here)

I’ve been doing a lot of “jams”, basically just toying with modules until I got something that was good enough to show.
I learned a lot about how synths work, circuit design and signal processing by doing them, and it’s great to be able to play with something that does not involve a computer once in a while.

Initially I just posted Instagram or Vine videos of them, but recently I’ve bought myself an USB sound card and am posting them to SoundCloud so they got a bit more long-form.

The constraints for what I consider to be a “jam” :

Don’t work on it for more than 2 or 3 hours (usually closer to an hour)

Record everything live, no post-processing other than trimming the ends, and fading them in or out

And the beauty of an analog system is that I’d have a really hard time reproducing an earlier jam, so once it’s unhooked and put aside, it’s gone. All I have from it is the recording. I tend to try something specific when starting a new jam, too, so there’s no point to repeat myself.

Here’s a collection of the longer (1 to 3 minutes) jams I’ve recorded. I’ll update as I post more.

I plan to gather the best of them when I got enough to call it an album, get it somewhat mastered and release it somewhere. Stay tuned, if you enjoy that type of thing!

The gameplay is a two-player cooperative physics sandbox and puzzle game. The objective for both players is to clear a path for Malisse as she walks on a sinuous path in the world through the looking glass…

A bunch of rabbits trail behind her, but they get scared easily! Everytime Malisse bumps into an object she cannot climb, a rabbit will run away, but you recover one rabbit for every level cleared. If all the rabbits are gone, Malisse ends up alone and … cries herself to death? That’s the end of that play session, anyway!
Otherwise, the levels are chosen randomly from a pool of 11 hastily-authored levels which vary in difficulty. If you get stuck early on your first attempt, definitely give it another shot since you might find more palatable challenges.

It was an interesting game jamming experience for me in many respects : first time with a 5-person team, first time implementing sprite animations in Unity (using 2D Toolkit), and first time writing a tool for use inside the Unity editor — a spline tool for drawing roads quickly. We also had interesting last-minute collision issues, since we wanted Malisse to be able to climb slopes but didn’t want to resort to rigid bodies to have that done automagically. Spherecasting to the rescue, and lots of debugging! ^_^

Pyramidwarf is a game I made in collaboration with Samuel Boucher (alias Monsieur Eurêka) with music by Stefan Boucher at the Global Game Jam 2014 in the TAG Lab of the Concordia University, in Montréal. The version you can download here is a tweaked, split-screen version of the “party build” you can find on the GGJ website.

We worked with Unity, as is the usual for me in game jams, and the initial idea was to make a stacking game where you’d either race the other player with a really unstable stack of little guys, or throw parts of your pyramid to the other player’s to break it up. And of course, this being a game jam, we didn’t do half of the stuff we planned for, and ended up with a super janky physics-based stacking game that happens to be silly enough to be fun!

On my side, it was my first time really exploiting Unity physics in a game. I’d done some basic rigid-body stuff and used character controllers (Volkenessen was physics based as well), but never hinges or physics-based multi-body animation. One of the fun/interesting parts to do under pressure was the walk animation using torque and impulses : the leg pushes itself up, angles up, the body gets a magical shove and the legs readjust themselves to stay upright. It’s definitely not physically correct, but it looks like a bunch of cardboard puppets and that’s exactly what we were going for!

To build the pyramid, dwarves need to go up somehow, and the way we solved that is just… teleportation. These little guys have magic on their side, and they can teleport to the first free spot of the pyramid to keep stacking up. This caused rigidbody overlapping problems that I sorta resolved by just testing a whole lot if something’s there before teleporting, and denying the move otherwise.

The “final 1.01” build I posted here is not bug-free, but it’s shippable, so here goes. I might come back to it and fix rendering issues, and maybe implement dwarf-throwing, because it still sounds so great in my head.

RAIN+BOW is game I made with Devine Lu Linvega as Les Collégiennes during TOJam Sixy Times in 2011, and lay on the backburner for many years until it was resurrected for a showing at Gamercamp in 2013, this past weekend! We finally took the time to add polishing touches and add gamepad support, so I’m happy to release this version as the final public build!

What am I looking at?

RAIN+BOW is a bullet hell, or a shmup where you need to make your way through a sea of bullets and enemies and hopefully kill some of them in the process. There is no score tracking, but the game tracks how far you were able to get and remembers your highest “score” for this playthrough. You have no health; a single bullet hitting your head will kill you, but as is usual in those kind of games, the hitbox is much smaller than the character.

There are three weapons at your disposal :

RAIN (-) : The “machine gun” continuous firing weapon, which does little damage but will grind away at oncoming enemies

CROSS (+) : The auto-guided missiles, which you can’t aim but will target nearby enemies and will clear up enemies behind you

BOW (|) : The laser weapon, which does take its time to charge but inflicts major damage, especially effective against blue “shield” enemies and columns of weaker enemies

Sometimes you’ll see an orange cat presenting you a power-up for one of your weapons; definitely kill that guy and grab the powerup to get a more effective firing rate and effectiveness, and if you reach level 3, a temporary ultra-powerful rainbow firing mode for that weapon.

You might think that spamming all three weapons at once is a good idea, but the firing rate is halved for every simultaneous weapon, which means you should prioritize the one you think is best suited for the situation, and fire off CROSS missiles every once in a while.

RAIN+BOW was made in Unity, with the models made in Cinema4D by Devine, and original music also created on the jam site by him back in 2011. It doesn’t use textures at all (all flat-coloured materials), and we even avoided transparency in favour of rapidly flashing entities on and off, to give an even more psychedelic and retro-arcadey feel to the game.
The levels are randomly generated based on predefined “events” that are presented in a random order, with some variation, in a very simplistic Spelunky-like way. Game difficulty varies wildly because the algorithms for level generation are quite crude, but it ends up being challenging and fun every time, which is what counts,… right?

August 18th, 2015 Update

This article could be an interesting reference for people trying to understand how you can submit your own buffers to do streaming audio with OpenAL, but the actual tools I’m using (NVorbis, OpenTK) are outdated and I can’t recommend them anymore.

If you’re looking for a modern C# way of doing the same thing, look at how the Song class is implemented with Ogg Vorbis support in Ethan Lee’s FNA library, using Xiph Vorbisfile and the DynamicSoundEffect API, especially if you’re trying to do this in a MonoGame- or XNA-like environment. It’s much faster, the codebase is cut by half, and much less threading pitfalls!

Original article follows…

Updated September 7th 2012 : New OggStream class with better support for concurrent stream playback.

I was looking for a suitable replacement for the audio streaming and compression capabilities of XACT when porting an XNA project to MonoGame, and it doesn’t look like there’s a clear winner yet. MonoGame contributors suggested NAudio, but it looks like work needs to be done to make it portable, and the sample code is a mess. FMod EX or competing commercial solutions are an easy but costly choice. So I turned to OpenAL to see if it can be a free and usable solution for streaming compressed audio with some DSP capabilities.
T’was a bit challenging, but not impossible! :)

Decoding OGGs

Out of the box, OpenAL doesn’t support being fed MP3 or OGG sources. There are extensions for those, but according to one implementation, they’re deprecated. So you need to handle decoding yourself and feed the PCM bitstream to OpenAL.

It sure would be nice to have a purely managed implementation of libVorbis, but it doesn’t exist, so there’s a dozen homemade decoders floating around open source code hubs in various states of workability. I was pointed to NVorbis by TheGrandHero on the TIGSource forums, and I haven’t found a better alternative yet. CsVorbis is another, but it doesn’t support streaming, all the decoding is done up-front, which defeats the purpose. OggSharp is just a fork of CsVorbis with XNA helpers, so nope. TheGrandHero also mentioned trying out DragonOgg but having problems with it.

NVorbis worked like a charm for me, but it’s pretty early and doesn’t support some features like seeking around the stream, so looping or restarting playback requires creating a new whole new reader/decoder. I also took some time to optimize the memory usage in my fork of the project.07/09/2012 Update : Andrew Ward, the author of NVorbis, resolved the memory allocation problems that the version I forked off had, so I pulled the new changes out instead.

Streaming

Once you have some decoded data, you have to make OpenAL stream it. This is sort of tricky but well–documented.

Fill at least one of those with the first samples of the sound and enqueue it/them to the source

Start playback of the source; it’ll play all the buffers associated with it, in order

In a background thread :

Query the source to know whether buffers have already been processed

If so, dequeue those buffers, refill them with fresh data and re-enqueue them

In practice, since it involves threads, it’s a bit more obtuse than the pseudo-code, but OpenAL makes it relatively painless. The trick is to read enough data and often enough to avoid buffer underruns.

Then, if you want to loop the sound, it’s not as easy as setting the source’s “Looping” parameter to true, because the buffers never contain the full sound file. Instead of no longer feeding the buffers when you hit the end of the Ogg stream, you just start back at the beginning and feed continuously, which has the nice side-effect of being 100% gapless.

Filters and effects

Finally, I wanted to have one fancy effect that XACT provided : low-pass filtering. This is used extensively in FEZ as a gameplay mechanic, so I could hardly live without it in MonoGame ports.

Thankfully, OpenAL Effect Extensions (EFX) provide cross-platform effects including filters, at least in theory. In reality, this depends on whether the driver implementation supports them, and even the Creative reference Windows implementation doesn’t on my system.

I was able to find a software implementation that does though, OpenAL Soft, and it’s cross-platform, so that bodes well.
To override the installed implementation, just supply the software DLL in the application’s directory and voilà. Had no problems with it up to now, performance or otherwise.

Plus, it comes with a console application that outputs which EFX and other extensions are supported in this implementation. This is handy to detect whether the right DLL’s been used, and helped me figured out that the Creative implementation didn’t support any filter. Here’s what it should say :

Sample class

The result of all of this is a OggStream class that is in my fork of NVorbis on GitHub, which you can find here :

Update : Version 2.0 comes with a sample console application which allows you to test and visualize how different streams get buffered and when buffer underruns occur in a nice concise format. I’m really quite happy about it, give it a shot! Here’s how it looks :
Legend of the symbols that this app blurts out :

FEZ shipped with volume textures (aka 3D textures) for all the sprite animations in the game. Gomez, NPCs and other animated pixel art were all done using those. This was a tech call that I made way back in 2008 and kept with it because it makes more sense than you might think :

No need to do texture packing and keeping track of where frames are in the sheet; a volume texture is an ordered list of 3D textures, every frame is a slice!

The pixel shader just does a tex3D() call with the Z component of the texture coordinates being the step of the animation between 0 and 1.

Cool side-effect : hardware linear interpolation between animation frames! This wasn’t very useful for me (except for one thing, water caustic overlays), but it’s a nice bonus.

Mip-mapping with 3D textures is problematic because it downsizes in X, Y and Z, meaning that each mip level halves the number of frames. However, I didn’t need mip mapping at all (for sprites), I never undersample pixel art.

Same limitation when making a volume texture power-of-two, it also goes power-of-two in the Z axis which means a lot of blank frames, which is wasteful but not a huge problem to deal with.

But while I haven’t done real testing, one can assume that they’re slower than a regular 2D sprite sheet, and they imply that you have one texture by animation, which restricts how much you can pack things together. Creating a volume texture at load-time with XNA Texture2D.SetData() calls means one call per animation frame, which is noticeably slow. Also, volume textures are not currently supported by MonoGame, and I assume some integrated graphics hardware would have trouble dealing with them.

So the more traditional alternative is using a sprite sheet, which is easy to make using tools like the Sprite Sheet Packer.

But then what if you need to use wrap texture addressing on it, to have horizontally and/or vertically repeating textures?

If you only repeat on one axis, have relatively small textures and a small number of frames, you can force the texture packer to layout the sprites on a single row or column, which allows wrapping on the other axis.

This worked for some animations, but some were just too big or had too many frames to fit it in under 4096 pixels. In that case, there’s one final option : pixel shaders to the rescue!

When addressing the texture in your shader, you’re likely to use a 3×3 texture matrix, or a 4D vector if you’re short on input parameters. Either way, you have four components : UV offset and UV scale. You can use those to manually wrap the texture coordinates on a per-pixel basis. In the sample below, I extract the data from a texture matrix.

The frac() HLSL intrinsic retains the decimal part of its input, which gives the normalized portion of the texture that the coordinates are supposed to show. Then I remap that to the sprite’s area in the atlas, and sample using those.

I ended up only needing wrapping on one axis for that big texture/animation, but this code does both just in case. This is WAY simpler than customizing the vertex texture coordinates to allow wrapping.
One caveat though, this won’t play well with linear filtering. Since FEZ is pixel art, I could get away with point sampling and had no artifacts there.

P.S. A simple fix to enable usage of linear filtering : pad the sprites with 1 pixel column and rows of the opposite side of the texture! (and don’t include those in the sampled area; it only gets sampled by the interpolator)

In its PoA demo form, it used the same crude networking code as The Cloud Is A Lie, which requires two computers plugged in the same LAN or ideally directly by a cross-wired ethernet cable. Releasing that particular version publicly made little sense, so we decided to make a much more extensive multiplayer version.

This game’s name might remind you of another Prince of Arcade game, this one in 2010 — Pico³. It’s the same basic idea of playing with colors, mixing and matching them, but this time in a competitive versus environment.

How To Play

Upon launching the game, you will find yourself in the Lobby, a temporary haven. You should look for an hexagon floating about the edges of your screen (right click drag to rotate around the planet) and click on it to practice against the AI. You might see circles too, they are other players and could challenge you as soon as you raise your shield.

To protect yourself against incoming attacks, find the patch of dirt marked by a black & white circle, and connect a node to it. The shield will light up, eating away at the incoming bullets with a similar hue. In the lobby, you are invisible to potential attackers as long as your shield is unpowered.

To win against your opponent, locate a patch of mushrooms and connect nodes to it — this is your cannon. It needs a minimum amount of power to be able to fire, and based on the incoming nodes, will fire bullets of various sizes and colours; easier or harder to defend against. The idea being to match the colour of incoming bullets with your shield, and to differ as much as possible from the opponent’s shield colour (which is indicated by the contour of his circular icon) with your cannon’s bullets.

Pico Battle is an entirely wordless game, and might seem offputting or hard to grasp at first. In the lobby, a robotic voice will explain the basics of the game, and take your time there to experiment with the controls and the scarce UI elements. As you get familiar with the game and its interface, you will discover strategies and enjoy it even more.

Updates

04/07/2012 — Version 1.1

Fixed bug where the AI wouldn’t defend itself if it is challenged too quickly